Transition of Interpretations, 1992-95
The change in tone and emphasis between Soviet-period and post-Soviet articles is evident as Ukrainian historians were now much freer to pursue independent research. They also benefited from direct collaboration with researchers from the West.
In August 1992, for example, a world forum of Ukrainians was announced that would conduct a round-table discussion on “Genocide in Ukraine,” with the participation of Robert Conquest, author of Harvest of Sorrow, and James E. Mace, as well as several well-known leaders from the Ukrainian Diaspora.24 For the first time, Ukrainian scholars and publicists began to give free rein to the topic of victimization of Ukraine by the Soviet authorities, particularly in the influential literary weekly, Literaturna Ukraina. This development is not surprising since the literary leaders of Ukraine were the initiators of the Ukrainian Popular Movement for Perestroika (Rukh) and had spearheaded the movement for autonomy and ultimately independence. The Famine now became the focal point of the early independence writing, which often took on literary and emotional forms.An important article in this regard was written by Ivan Drach under the title “The Genocide of Ukraine” in the fall of 1992. Drach provides first of all the image of Chornobyl: “We are living on the ruins and have not been able to finish counting all our losses.” Likewise the Famine “is hidden in our genetic depths” like some sort of nuclear monster and brings forth negative energy that leads to constant bickering and inability to comprehend even simple things among the Ukrainian people. Voices are sometimes heard, he writes, that complain about the “victim mentality” in the national discourse.
The phenomenon of the nation-Christ, which is being crucified endlessly, with only the executioners and guards rotating at the site of the crucifixion has not been fully comprehended by mankind or us.
Human civilization has yet to apologize to Ukrainians for their services paid in blood and flesh... This is the century through the main calamities of which— world wars, communism, fascism, nuclear energy—comes the main message of the new era: genocide against Ukrainians.25Ukrainian losses in the 20th century, Drach continues, are numbered not in hundreds of thousands, but in millions and “dozens of millions.” It is possible to lose track of the count because no one knows how many were liquidated by the White and Red guards or perished in the famines of 1921-22 and 193233, or how many were dispersed around Siberia. Stalin's plan for a “final solution” to the Ukrainian question cited by Khrushchev was just a symptom of this paranoia. Here in its most simplistic form is the victim theory of what might be termed the “permanent persecution” of Ukrainians. With the open communication with Western scholars about the Famine, it was now possible to develop a new interpretation of an event that had long been hidden officially from the Ukrainian public.
The first notable occasion for a commemoration was the 60th anniversary of the Famine in 1993. After decades of neglect, Ukrainian newspapers and journals could direct their focus to the event. An editorial in Literaturna Ukraina stated that it was now known that “millions upon millions” of Ukrainians and members of other nationalities had perished from hunger. Therefore every oblast, district, town, and village of the newly independent country should honor the sacred memory of the innocent victims of hunger. Crosses should be erected and mass gravesites properly maintained, and most important, young people and children should know and remember the “horrendous crime of the Communist clique” against the Ukrainian nation. Parents, teachers, and museum guides must be responsible for narrating the story of the Famine. Officially the occasion was to be known as Days of Sorrow and Remembrance. The editorial remarked that the horrific events of sixty years ago should serve as a warning what can happen when a “freedom-loving and industrious nation” lacks its own state.26 Two days later, the editor of the same newspaper V.
Kyryluk declared that the Famine was an attempt to “liquidate the Ukrainian nation” thus completing the “dirty work of Russian autocrats” through an unheard of genocide that had accounted for the deaths of up to 15 million people.27The theme of Soviet persecution of Ukraine and Ukrainians was also taken up by Vasyl Mazorchuk, who maintained that the objective of Lenin and his associates in the Russian Revolution was to turn Russia (including Ukraine) into a source of cheap labor and mineral resources for the developed countries of the world. How did the Famine fit into this argument? The Bolsheviks believed that by using tractors in agriculture, they would be able to dispense with the large number of excess peasants. A food surplus would be created by reducing the number of consumers, which could then be exported. The famine in his view was the ultimate manifestation of racism, and one can perceive a historical parallel between the Ukrainian victims and the Native Americans who are victims of US government policies.28 Racism is also the subject of an impassioned article by Ivan Drach, one of the founders of Rukh, who in a speech delivered at a conference on the 50th anniversary of the Famine, stated that the first lesson is that Russia in the past, present, and future has only a destructive and negative attitude toward Ukraine. Many Russians, he writes, “suffer from a fatal Ukrainophobia.” At the present time, Drach laments, Russia is not considering any repentance for severing the Ukrainian nation in half over the past 75 years. He and like-minded Ukrainians would like the northern neighbor to turn its attention to the condition of Ukraine. The Ukrainian nation has survived and now demands of Moscow that it take responsibility for its misdeeds of the past, especially for the Holodomor of 1933, which brought losses of 8-12 million, double those incurred during the war of 1941-45.29
A more balanced analysis was provided by historian Vasyl' Marochko in a series of articles in the newspaper Osvita, also published to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Famine.
At the outset he counters claims that the Famine constituted a war of one nation against another. Clearly it took on an anti-Ukrainian direction, but its real organizers—the Soviet political elite— were made up of different nationality groups. However, the Famine was manmade and consciously organized by the Soviet political leadership even though its purpose, in his view, was to physically exterminate the peasants of Ukraine. The Famine occurred, he states, as a result of “the forcible introduction of the Communist doctrine in agriculture, a doctrine that remained alien to Ukrainian peasants” since the latter were attuned to the tradition of individual farming.30 Without doubt, he says, the Famine was genocide; a fact, he adds incorrectly, long established by foreign scholars. The actions of the authorities were illegal because they persecuted peasants who did not commit any crimes, but simply refused to join the kolkhozes and surrender their bread (of which frequently they had none). In the fall of 1933, following the famine, a large number of Belarusian and Russian peasants were settled in the empty villages of Ukraine. Marochko also provides his assessment of the number of victims of the Famine, arriving at the conclusion that losses in Ukraine amounted to around 2.9 million people, a very different total from that of Kyrylyuk cited above.31